Biography

Veronica Buckley was born in New Zealand. Alongside her first studies in languages and philosophy at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, she trained as a classical ‘cellist, and worked for some time as an orchestral musician before taking up history scholarships at London and Oxford. While in England, Veronica wrote a series of children’s stories for performance with orchestra, and in 2001 she moved to Paris to devote herself to full-time writing.

Veronica’s historical biographies, Christina, Queen of Sweden and Madame de Maintenon: The Secret Wife of Louis XIV, are complemented by art and travel writing and political journalism, as well as film, stage, and book translations from German and French. She is also a regular arts, theatre and book review contributor to the Vienna Review. Veronica’s latest work, Twilight of the Romanovs, an evocative photographic history of the late Russian Empire, was produced together with her husband, historian and writer Philipp Blom.

Veronica has recently completed her first novel, Koru, a fable of the Japanese occupation of New Zealand in the Second World War.

Her work has been translated into German, Italian, Swedish, Dutch, Portuguese, and Czech. She currently lives in Los Angeles.